“Sneak into his office and do what?” I asked her.
“Look around.”
“What do you expect me to find?”
“Well, I don’t know, do I? He must be leaving a trail somewhere. Check his computer.”
“He’s never even there to use his computer,” I said. “He probably keeps everything on his phone.”
“Then steal his phone.”
“Yousteal his phone,” I said. “I’ve got homework.”
She said she’d be meeting soon with the Old Families—a consortium made up of everyone who got left behind in the Mage’s revolution.
(My father goes to these meetings, too, but his heart’s not in it. He’d rather talk about magickal livestock and archival seed stock. The Grimms are farmers. My mother must have been sick in love to marry him.)
After my mother died, anyone who had the courage to stand up to the Mage’s military coup was quickly forced off the Coven. No one from the Old Families has had a seat for the last decade—even though most of the Mage’s reforms are aimed at us:
Banned books, banned phrases. Rules about when we can meet and where. Taxes to cover all the Mage’s initiatives; most notably to pay for every faun bastard and centaur cousin, and every pathetic excuse for a magician in the Realm to attend Watford. The World of Mages never had taxes before. Taxes were for Normals; we had standards instead.
You can’t blame the Old Families for striking back at the Mage however we can.
Anyway, I told Fiona that I’d do it. That I’d go up to the Mage’s office and look around, even if it was pointless.
“Take something,” she said, gripping her steering wheel.
I was in the back seat, so I could see only a slice of her face in the rearview mirror. “Take what?”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Take something.”
“I’m not a thief,” I said.
“It’s not thieving—that office ishers,it’s yours. Take something for me.”
“All right,” I said.
I almost always go along with Fiona in the end. The way she misses my mother keeps her alive for me.
***
But tonight I’m too tired to do Fiona’s bidding.
And too jumpy. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being followed—that whoever it was who paid the numpties to take me will try again.
By the time I’m done in the Catacombs, it feels like I’m dragging my own corpse up the tower steps to our room.
Snow’s asleep when I come in.
Normally I shower in the mornings, and he showers at night.
We’ve got the dance all worked out, after so many years. Moving around the room without touching or talking or looking at each other. (Or at least not looking at each other while the other is paying attention.)
But there are cobwebs in my hair tonight, and I was so thirsty that I got blood under my nails when I fed.
That hasn’t happened since I was 14, not since I was just getting the hang of this. I can usually drain a polo pony without staining my lips.
I move around the room quietly. As much as I enjoy disturbing Snow, tonight I just need to clean off and get some sleep.
